Present technology allows users of hand-held, wireless devices to access to applications on the Internet. Some of those applications need to access information about wireless devices which may be considered private. Two types of information which may be considered private are information on whether a wireless device is currently turned on (“presence” information) and information about the geographic location of a wireless device (“location” information). For example, a network application might need to know the location of a wireless device in order to provide the device with real-time traffic or weather updates relevant to the user's location. Other examples of private information are serial numbers and telephone numbers of wireless devices.
Wireless devices commonly access the Internet through a gateway which links the wireless network to the Internet. The gateway or a separate server system may act as a proxy server, which proxies requests from the wireless devices to applications on the Internet. In some cases, when private information is needed by a network application in order to process a request from a wireless device, the proxy server adds the private information to the request before sending the request to the network application.
The proxy server is typically operated by the wireless carrier. However, the wireless carrier generally cannot release private information to network applications without prior authorization from the subscriber. Today, the subscriber's authorization to release private information is normally acquired in a paper agreement or click-through agreement. These types of privacy agreement can be cumbersome to manage and normally must be in place before a subscriber attempts to access applications which require private data. Further, there is no way for the subscriber to give permission to release private data on a per request basis. In addition, the carrier generally must inform the subscriber about every modification to the agreement manually, and the user must agree to this before the modifications can take effect.